Dr. Joanne Wolfe is the Division Chief of Pediatric Palliative Care in the Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Director of Palliative Care at Children's Hospital Boston. She is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She holds an MD degree (1990) from Harvard Medical School and an MPH (1998) from the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Wolfe is the medical director of the Pediatric Advanced Care Team, a palliative care service for children cared for at the DFCI and CHB.  PACT received a 2001 Citation of Honor from the American Hospital Association’s Circle of Life Awards program for it’s innovative approach to caring for children with life-limiting illness. 

Through support from the Project on Death in America and the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Foundation, Dr. Wolfe has developed one of the only pediatric palliative care fellowship programs.  She first became interested in end-of-life care during her fellowship training when she embarked on a research project to identify the needs of children with cancer who have life-limiting illness and how to better support their families.  This project led to two high profile research publications in the New England Journal of Medicine (342:326-333, 2000) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (284: 2469-2475, 2000).

Dr. Wolfe is currently heading a research program evaluating interventions aimed at improving quality of life for children with advanced cancer and their families. It is also designed to delineate the quality of key elements of care by studying parent and physician perceptions about prognosis and treatment goals, and symptoms and quality of life in children.  She and her research team are tracking symptoms and quality of life in children with advanced cancer using a computerized data collection system called Pediatric Quality of Life and Evaluation of Symptoms Technology (PediQUEST).  Among a random half of subjects, they are evaluating the feasibility of a novel intervention that provides feedback on symptoms and quality of life using PediQUEST reports as a component of the routine care of children with advanced cancer.  The PediQUEST system generates electronic mail notifications alerting providers of repeated high levels of symptom distress.  The study is based on the hypothesis that routine symptom and quality of life feedback will lead to better control of symptoms and result in less distress.  Greater attention to quality of life also may stimulate parent and physician communication about prognosis and treatment goals and may lead to earlier decision-making about palliative care outcomes.